Customers of many different types of equipment may have unique physical mounting requirements for the equipment. It can be the case that the customer has a specific type and size of enclosure into which the customer-requested equipment must be installed. Examples of such situations include communications equipment, general-purpose electronic equipment and computer equipment such as computer networking devices, network attached storage devices and general-purpose computing equipment. Each of these types of devices, and many more that will easily be identified by those skilled in the art, can be installed into a custom-designed enclosure, such as a rack assembly. These enclosures can be designed to fit specific customer applications. They may be designed to fit into certain centralized locations in a customer facility, to fit together in some way for ease of installation and maintenance, or to meet other specific, physical requirements of the customer.
Such a situation creates difficulty and added expense for several reasons. The various components making up the equipment to be installed in the enclosure may come from different suppliers. Specialized skills may be required to install the equipment in the enclosure and verify the functionality of the assembly. The customer location may be thousands of miles away from the various manufacturers of the components and, in fact, the customer may have several widely-separated locations at which it wishes to receive the completed assemblies.
The current solution to this problem requires the customer to obtain the necessary enclosure(s) at the desired locations and order or otherwise obtain the equipment to be installed. Skilled technicians must then travel to the customer location(s) to install the equipment into the enclosure(s) and test it for safety compliance and functionality. This process is unwieldy and expensive, adding time and expense where the customer can ill afford either.
For these reasons, and others readily identified by those skilled in the art, it would be desirable to a customer to simplify the process of obtaining equipment installed in a custom assembly, tested and ready to operate.